My Body Tutor : No More Excuses

I wanted to share a routine with you that my extremely smart friend, Cal Newport, does that’s extremely corny but also great.

Cal is incredible. He is an aspiring professor who just completed his PhD at MIT and is now completing his post-doc there too. While doing all of this – he was maintaining his popular blog, Study Hacks, and is now on his 3rd book. If anyone knows about productivity and stress – it’s him.

So, a while back he had a post about he drastically reduces work stress with a shutdown ritual.

When he’s done with work for the day, he says his magic phrase, “schedule shutdown, complete.”

I know. I know. Even he was embarrassed to admit it. But there’s a golden nugget for us…

Many people do the worst of their eating late at night, when no one is around, after they already had dinner.

I want you to try a new routine this week. I’ve been experimenting with it for a few months and it’s helping a lot.

As soon as you’re done with dinner, I’d like for you to go to the bathroom and brush your teeth. Even better would be to floss, and use mouth wash as well.

Then before you go back to the kitchen to clean the dishes, log on and submit your feedback.

I promise the dishes will still be there.

By doing this not only are you cleaning your mouth and in essence ‘closing the kitchen’ so to speak but you’ll also be way less likely to eat anything else while you’re cleaning up the kitchen.

Many people eat 3 dinners. While they’re preparing dinner, during dinner and after dinner. This will definitely help with the after dinner eating.

Because your mouth will feel so fresh, you won’t want to eat anything else. You’ll also be less likely to have mouth cravings – which is when you ‘truly’ just want something sweet.

One of the many reasons why MBT works so well is because lying to yourself (and us) is the worst feeling in the world. Of course, if you choose to eat something after submitting your feedback, you’ll feel compelled to report to us. And that’s okay. Honesty is key! But it just adds another barrier to eating.

“Do I really want to eat this?” “Do I really want to email my tutor about this?”

And if you feel like getting all goofy, instead of saying, “schedule shutdown, complete,” how about saying, “feedback is submitted, kitchen is closed!”